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“Treat the earth well: it was not given to you by your parents, it was loaned to you by your children. We do not inherit the Earth from our Ancestors; we borrow it from our Children.”Ancient American Indian Proverb Civilitas successit barbarum Ubi Jus - Ibi Remedium ----> Equity sees that as done what ought to be done Equity will not suffer a wrong to be without a remedy - Equity delights in equality - One who seeks equity must do equity - Equity aids the vigilant, not those who slumber on their rights - Equity imputes an intent to fulfill an obligation - Equity acts in personam - Equity abhors a forfeiture - Equity does not require an idle gesture - He who comes into equity must come with clean hands - Equity delights to do justice and not by halves -Equity will not complete an imperfect gift - Equity will not allow a statute to be used as a cloak for fraud

"A narcissistic know-nothing con artist who has spent his entire life swindling others while repeatedly urging followers to commit criminal acts of violence against his critics," writes David Cay Johnston. Who could he be talking about? I asked...

Full frontal exposure of the Trump Presidency by two New York Times bestselling investigative reporters — conversing, debating. This event was broadcast live from our sold out event in Los Angeles on Wednesday, January 31.

Watch Palast question Johnston about the accusations in his book, including Johnston’s revelation of Trump’s 2005 tax return — and his explanation of why it reeks of criminality!

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Johnston’s It's Even Worse Than You Think: What the Trump Administration Is Doing to America, opened this week at #2 on the Times' bestseller list.

And Amazon and Amazon Prime have just released The Best Democracy Can Buy:The Case of the Stolen Election, Palast's film of his investigation for Rolling Stone on how Trump’s cronies swiped the 2016 election.

In the excitement to get Donald Trump out of office, are we empowering groups like the FBI and NSA to go after American Citizens with little evidence and less transparency? Investigative Reporter Greg Palast joins to inform us on the dark side of the Steele Dossier and how the state could use it against activists like you.

Dr. Lawrence Brown, Professor of Public Health at Morgan State University says the new revelations from the Gun Trace Task Force corruption trial reveal how the underlying and historical imperative of policing require dismantling law enforcement and constructing new health-driven models for keeping communities safe

It doesn't come close to spending enough to fix the nation's roads, bridges and tunnels.

By Barry Ritholtz

February 13, 2018, 1:02 PM EST

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The White House had an opportunity to create a robust, economically sound plan to modernize America. Instead, the administration seems ready to give private investors 🐉🦕🦖 a giftat the expense of the taxpaying public. About the last thing this will do is make America great again.

The first casualty of the Trump era is truth, the second is moral responsibility, the third is any vestige of justice, and the fourth is a massive increase in human misery and suffering for millions.

Instead of refusing to cooperate with evil, Americans increasingly find themselves in a society in which those in commanding positions of power and influence exhibit a tacit approval of the emerging authoritarian strains and acute social problems undermining democratic institutions and rules of law. As such, they remain silent and therefore, complicit in the face of such assaults on American democracy.

Ideological extremism and a stark indifference to the lies and ruthless polices of the Trump administration have turned the Republican Party into a party of collaborators, not unlike the Vichy government that collaborated with the Nazis in the 1940s.

Both groupsbought into the script of ultra-nationalism, encouraged anti-Semitic mobs, embraced a militant masculinity, demonized racial and ethnic others, supported an unchecked militarism and fantasies of empire, and sanctioned state violence at home and abroad.

Doctors seek a unifying diagnosis to explain symptoms and inform a prognosis. My diagnosis for a Trumped-up White House with pseudo-populism as a diversion is naked greed. “Trust me” winks from the far-right wing predict a dire prognosis for the 99 percent.

In one career, my 38 working years as an oncologist, U.S. society has done a “180”—from a Peace Corps legacy🕊 to TV’s “Apprentice” and a mentality of social Darwinism 🦀. Rupert Murdoch’s Fox, echoing the Koch brother’s ALEC , the Cato Institute, and James Buchanan/Milton Friedman libertarianism have made “you eat what you kill” the sacred creed of their right-wing propaganda machine. And much of America has joined in the chant of “money over all 🦖.”

Soul searching over civil rights, the Pentagon Papers and Watergate once prompted a national catharsis and predicted an era of enlightened, transparent governance of America. But since those innocent days, the decades of my medical career have witnessed health care turned from a noble profession into “profit center” exploitation among Big Insurance, Big Pharma and Big Hospitals.

Many physicians joined in the gold rush, emboldened by Wall Street’s “greed is great” mantra. One of the executives over me, his salary measured in the millions per year, would interrogate me regularly—“Fangman, is there any money in stem cell transplants” or other research trends du jour he’d seen a headline for in The Wall Street Journal. Never did the question he was paid to ask arise: Will innovation x, y or z improve our community’s health care?

That same slickster CEO was also an early adopter of Beltway hyper-polarization. His oft-used curse—“those dirty Democrats”—was a warning to anyone with a liberal instinct in his sphere of influence.

Understand that I am no socialist or partisan advocate. I’ve always been an independent. I earned money by hard work and respect a foundational tenet of capitalism: If you snooze, you lose. There was bad governance by Wendy Lee Gramm, Bill Clinton, Lawrence Summers, George W. Bush, Barack Obama. They coddled and then bailed out the pervasive greed of Wall Street and that of greedy mortgage bankers like Angelo Mozilo at Countrywide, as it flushed away much of my career’s work and the security of millions of others in the Great Recession. This casino mentality is still taking the 99 percent for suckers. Trump’s “tax reform” is yet another smoke screen for unvarnished greed. Read about Kimberly Clark’s tax cut plans as an example.

I don’t write to grind my ax. I write because con men running this nation are confusing American voters. Since the 1980s, hucksters too numerous to recount—see Bush/Dick Cheney, Henry Paulson, Lloyd Blankfein and now Donald Trump 🦀 —have seduced solid, hard-working Americans to believe in bogus scams like invading Iraq. The Koch brothers’ anti-democracy libertarianism has taken Friedman’s dog-eat-dog “trickle down” to new lows.

The longer we are ruled by oligarchs, the deadlier our predicament becomes, especially since the oligarchs refuse to address climate change, the greatest existential crisis to humankind.

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There is little dispute that we live in an oligarchic state. The wealthiest 1 percent of America’s families control 40 percent of the nation’s wealth, a statistic similar to what is seen globally: The wealthiest 1 percent of the world’s population owns more than half of the world’s wealth. This wealth translates into political power. The political scientists Martin Gilens of Princeton and Benjamin Page of Northwestern, after examining differences in public opinion across income groups on a wide variety of issues, concluded, “In the United States, our findings indicate, the majority does not rule—at least not in the causal sense of actually determining policy outcomes. When a majority of citizens disagrees with economic elites and/or with organized interests, they generally lose. Moreover … even when fairly large majorities of Americans favor policy change, they generally do not get it.”

Oligarchs accelerate social, political, cultural and economic collapse. The unchecked plunder leads to systems breakdown. The refusal to protect natural resources, or the economic engines that sustain the state, means that poverty becomes the norm and the natural world becomes a toxic wasteland. Basic institutions no longer work. Infrastructure is no longer reliable. Water, air and soil are poisoned. The population is left uneducated, untrained, impoverished, oppressed by organs of internal security and beset by despair. The state eventually goes bankrupt. Oligarchs respond to this steady deterioration by forcing workers to do more for less and launching self-destructive wars in the vain attempt to restore a lost golden age. They also insist, no matter how bad it gets, on maintaining their opulent and hedonistic lifestyles. They further tax the resources of the state, the ecosystem and the population with suicidal demands. They flee from the looming chaos into their gated compounds, modern versions of Versailles or the Forbidden City. They lose touch with reality. In the end, they are overthrown or destroy the state itself. There is no institution left in America that can be called democratic, and thus there is no internal mechanism to prevent a descent into barbarity.

But Grassley's decision is also extremely political. Not only does it show that Republicans 🐉🦕 🦖 🦀 will dispense with any rule or tradition that stands between them and exerting political power, it also shows that the GOP is eager to foist extremist judges on purple and blue states.

"Today's vote… shows just how far Chuck Grassley is willing to go to cripple the system of checks and balances designed to protect our federal courts and our liberty," said Marge Baker, People for the American Way executive vice president. "His decision to move forward on the Brennan nomination over the objection of a home state senator sends a clear signal that the Trump administration can run roughshod over individual senators when it comes to judicial nominations. Donald Trump and [White House Counsel] Don McGahn have repeatedly nominated unqualified political cronies and narrow-minded elitists to critical seats on the federal bench."

Which Country Do People around the World View as the Top Global Power?

Since his election, President Donald Trump has pushed an "America First" policy, pulling the United States out of global alliances on trade, the environment, and defense. And people around the world seem to have had strong reactions to these policies. The results of a new Gallup poll, published in January 2018, indicate that the world no longer sees the U.S. as the top power in global leadership. The poll, which surveyed people in 134 countries, gave the United States a tepid 30 percent approval rating, behind Germany and China.What a difference a year makes:

Germany was seen as the top global leader by 41 percent of those polled, followed by China at 31 percent. Russia scored a 27 percent approval rating for its global role.

Gallup says that the world’s perception of U.S. leadership is at its lowest level since the poll began more than 10 years ago. The poll gave the U.S. a 48 percent approval rating during Barack Obama’s final year in office.

In about half of the world’s countries, America’s standing collapsed by 10 percentage points or more. Some of the biggest defections: allies in Western Europe, Australia, and Latin America.

President Reagan labeled poor people as “welfare queens” back in the 1970s, but our nation’s stigma against the poor is as strong as ever. And as a result, misguided welfare policies — like drug testing recipients of public assistance — are making a comeback.

Just look at the White House’s most recent assaults on America’s poor. In the past few weeks, the federal government opened the door to work requirements for people who receive housing subsidies and Medicaid coverage. States see an opening for various ways to limit Medicaid benefits and cover fewer people. The White House is also proposing cutting off millions of people who receive food assistance and limiting the food choice for those who still get benefits. These policies focus on policing behavior rather than addressing needs. And that’s because they are based on stigma, not facts.

Despite their popularity, these types of changes don’t guarantee an escape from poverty or a better life. Instead, they further demean poor Americans and make their lives more difficult.

To understand the depth of our nation’s stigma against the poor, let’s look at our track record with drug tests. There is overwhelming evidence that drug testing recipients of assistance saves no money and identifies few drug users, despite claims from prominent Republicans. The popularity of drug testing welfare recipients shows the power of the widespread belief that poverty and drugs go hand in hand.

The idea that welfare recipients are criminals who use illicit substances is a well-worn stereotype about the so-called undeserving poor. And it has real consequences for their lives.

People often mistakenly thought Rebecca, a poor woman in her early 30s I interviewed in Philadelphia, was a drug addict because she had no teeth. Many poor people without access to dental care find that the cheapest way to treat a serious tooth problem is to have it pulled, especially when dental issues go untreated until it’s too late for other interventions.

Rebecca longed for enough money to afford dentures, telling me she couldn’t wait to get a job “as soon as I get my teeth.” The irony of Rebecca — and so many others — losing medical assistance because she isn’t fulfilling work requirements is that affordable care is precisely what would help her secure work.

Meanwhile, misperceptions about poor people using drugs have led multiple states to pass legislation to drug test applicants or recipients of Temporary Assistance for Needy Families. Now, states are seeking to drug test Medicaid recipients as well. Because testing eligible recipients costs more than the money that would be saved by withholding benefits from the tiny percentage who test positive, drug testing is not cost-effective.

Florida taxpayers, for example, spent $118,140 to reimburse people who tested negative for the cost of testing, which was $45,780 more than the state saved by denying benefits to the 2.6 percent of applicants who tested positive. And other states are doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results.

Appeals courts declared the drug testing laws unconstitutional. But Florida spent hundreds of thousands of taxpayer dollars to fight to overturn the ruling in court, and that means even more taxpayer money spent on these already costly and unwise policies.

It comes as no surprise that states and the White House 🦀 are reviving similar limits on Medicaid and housing programs as well. Our elected leaders are misinformed about the issue and rely on stereotypes of the poor to make these decisions.

During his term as Pennsylvania Gov. Tom Corbett claimed — in complete defiance of the evidence — “many employers…say we’re looking for people but we can’t find anybody that has passed a drug test, a lot of them.”

Statements like this translate into policies that punish and stigmatize the poor without saving any money. They also feed the public’s doubt in the moral worth of those experiencing poverty. It implies that poor people use drugs; otherwise, why would we even be considering such tests?

The fact that our public officials 🐉🦕🦖🦀 continue to waste taxpayer dollars makes clear that stigmatizing poor people is a higher priority than either sensible spending or helping the poor. The moral problem before us is not drug use or laziness, but rather the pervasive belief that poor people do not deserve our help unless they meet an arbitrary standard we do not apply to anyone else.

It’s time we had policies to aid the most vulnerable among us that are based on evidence instead of derogatory stereotypes.Money spent on drug testing poor people — or on ensuring recipients of housing subsidies or Medicaid are fulfilling work requirements —would be better spent on affordable housing, increased child care subsidies, and the creation of jobs that pay a living wage.

Joan Maya Mazelis 🕊 is an associate professor of sociology and an affiliated scholar at the Center for Urban Research and Education at Rutgers University-Camden. Her book “Surviving Poverty: Creating Sustainable Ties among the Poor” is available from NYU Press. Follow her on Twitter @JoanieMazelis